The Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)

Courtesy of my e-book reader and FREE BOOKS from Project Gutenburg, I am reading classics I avoided reading as a student, or re-reading some I did (and was bored by). I have also re-read many things I liked as an adolescent/college student. I find a mature adult perspective changes my attitude remarkably.

Some of my old favorites from college turned out to be far more... mediocre than I remembered back then (that's you, Michael Moorcock). I am less tolerant of crappy pro writing since I started writing myself, and saw way too much of it in fanfic.

Some of them have aged like fine wine, turning out far better than I remembered back then (that's you, Robert E. Howard). As a young woman, I devoured genre books for the action and the "gee-whiz" factor (in movies, we call it "eye-candy"); as an older adult, I more appreciate interesting characters and settings.

I find I like many of the classics *now*; I would not have enjoyed them as an adolescent or college student. I recently read Wuthering Heights, which is a totally awesome train wreck of dysfunctional characters. The author very carefully keeps your sympathies from battening too hard on to characters doomed to destruction, and preserves the characters she finally does let us like. I greatly enjoyed the book. I would have hated it as a student and not "gotten" it. I rather doubt I'd push it on adolescents in general, as I think they'd miss half of what's going on in that story, and care about less.

I have yet to re-read The Great Gatsby to see if it still sucks as much as it did in high school, though.

Also, Shakespeare's tragedies are far more fun seen in the theater than read as scripts. My then-adolescent daughter and the rest of the family really enjoyed a kabuki-style performance of "Titus Andronicus". There's something about that over-the-top Greek-style tragedy done as a Japanese kabuki or noh drama that just fit, perfectly. I suspect actual over-the-top Greek tragedies, like "Medea", would be cool as noh or kabuki.

(Also, if you educate your children in the classics, they'll know which stories major comic-book plot arcs were stolen from... like X-Men's Madelyne Prior arc vis-a-vis Euripides' "Medea").